What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time

As we finish up the semester, it's time to take a look back and to connect the dots. For your final post, I would like you to discuss our progress as a class from the point at which we began--questioning the discourse of liberal humanism--to the postcolonial position we are currently occupying. Focus on those points along the way that have most intrigued you or upset you. As you try to draw connections between these points, remember that theory at its best presents a set of questions rather than offering definitive answers. In your opinion, which theories have presented the most significant questions, with regard to cultural texts and the culture(s) in which they operate? Have you found new ways to think about the study of literature or to look at literature itself? Which theories have afforded those opportunities for you?

This last post should be both substantial and comprehensive--a way of rising to the occasion of finishing your study and this project. I have enjoyed continuing our conversation on this forum, and I thank you for the energy and enthusiasm you have put into it.

Guest Lecture, Tonya Krouse on Feminism

I am happy to welcome Tonya Krouse, our final guest lecturer for the semester. Dr. Krouse, an Assistant Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University, specializes in twentieth-century literature, culture, and theory. Her recent scholarship focuses on explicit representations of sex and sexuality in the novels of Lawrence, Woolf, and Joyce. I include below her guest post, which provides an excellent history of feminist theory and criticism as it has developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You will find that the post addresses the complexities of feminist theory you have already begun to encounter in your reading and discussions of Mantissa and offers an understanding of the challenges and opportunities afforded by feminist approaches. Thank you, Dr. Krouse, for your interest in our class and for a thorough, detailed, and thought-provoking post.

Since we will be off for most of the week for the holiday, you do not have a blog post due this week. Please read Dr. Krouse's post and prepare a response to it for next week's post, due on Wednesday December 3 by 5 p.m.

What does it mean to be a feminist? What does it mean to practice a feminist methodology for literary criticism or to approach literature and/or culture from a feminist theoretical approach? These questions are ones that we might ask about any theoretical perspective through which we read literature or study culture, but in some ways these questions become more fraught as soon as any version of the word “feminism” is uttered. Why? Well, as Susan J. Douglas writes in the introduction to her (excellent) book Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, from images in popular culture and from experiences in our daily lives “we all know what feminists are. They are shrill, overly aggressive, man-hating, ball-busting, selfish, hairy, extremist, deliberately unattractive women with absolutely no sense of humor who see sexism at every turn. They make men’s testicles shrivel up to the size of peas, they detest the family and think all children should be deported or drowned. Feminists are relentless, unforgiving, and unwilling to bend or compromise; they are singlehandedly responsible for the high divorce rate, the shortage of decent men, and the unfortunate proliferation of Birkenstocks in America” (7). Although this passage is self-consciously ironic and intended to be funny, it gets to the difficulty that critics face in adopting a “feminist” approach in their work. Feminist theory and criticism is political. To do feminist work, by whatever definition, is to embrace a certain kind of identity as a thinker.

And there is no one true version of this approach. It can be helpful to imagine feminist theory as a many-headed monster, an approach to literary texts and to culture that is at once political and interdisciplinary, that at one and the same time engages with a tradition of Western metaphysics, philosophy, and theory even as it challenges that tradition. Feminist theory, like Marxist theory or Poststructuralist theory or Psychoanalytic theory, constitutes a way of reading, but at the same time, it is a way of reading that does not exclude those other approaches but rather requires the critic to take from those other approaches when it is possible and to resist the conventions of those approaches when those conventions undermine a feminist politics. Moreover, the moment that one decides to use feminist theory, as soon as one embraces that perspective and announces it, readers will come to one’s ideas with a certain set of assumptions. And those assumptions are often contradictory, and they reflect the ways in which what it means to be a feminist remains a subject of hot debate in our culture. There is no one “feminist theory” that you can categorize, understand, and put into a neat box. Rather, there are only feminist theories, multiple approaches that proliferate in answer to one basic question: what strategies can a critic use to read literature and culture in such a way that he or she refuses to perpetuate masculinist discourses about identity, the body, and subjectivity?

Thus, in order to talk about feminist theory, it is necessary first to discuss those “masculinist discourses” that such a theory attempts to challenge. So what are those discourses? Let’s think about that for a moment. How are women gendered in our culture? Not women artists – just women generally? Well, they’re supposed to be nurturing. They’re supposed to be beautiful. Women exist for the purpose of inspiring men. (Think, for example, about how the muse is represented in Mantissa.) They are supposed to be, in many instances, seen and not heard, to appear rather than to see. They are supposed to keep the home fires burning while men go off into the public world to do great things. “Masculinist discourses” keep women in their place, a place in which they are mothers and sisters and wives and daughters – in which they are defined exclusively through their relation to men. They may be “honored” or “cherished” or “adored” – even loved – but they are not, necessarily, respected. Indeed, women have, in “masculinist discourses,” as Virginia Woolf writes in her seminal (and I use that word with tongue firmly in cheek) feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own, “served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” Such power is complicit power. It is not agency: it is the power to mirror, to react, and to reflect. If art requires the writing subject to do something other than to react and to reflect – if it requires the writing subject to create – then the woman writer is in an interesting bind. Her subject position, informed by gender, precludes her from creating: indeed, the only creativity that she is allowed is procreation, which has already been co-opted by masculinist discourses to describe what male artists do when they make art. So what does it take for a woman to make art?

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf, who writes under the auspices that she has been asked to give a talk about “Women and Literature,” attempts to trace a history of literature that includes women. Woolf argues not only that a woman must have a room of her own and an independent income in order to create literature, but also, in order to support that argument, she interrogates the systems of oppression that have excluded women from a canon of great literature. For Woolf, one cannot separate the material conditions of real women’s lives from the conditions necessary for the creative imagination to flourish. Woolf’s argument depends on tracing a history of the representation of women in writing as well as the history of women’s attempts themselves to write. On the one hand, Woolf believes that women writers must “think back through their mothers”; on the other, Woolf believes, as she states in her essay “Professions for Women,” that women writers must kill the “angel in the house” (or that voice that tells them “women can’t write,” women can’t be great artists) if they hope to become great artists. So which is it? Must women embrace a particularly female literary tradition, or must women “kill” that internal voice, the voice of that figure for patriarchal values the “angel in the house,” which regulates what she might create? For Woolf, it’s not an either-or. Women writers, and artists more generally, must both embrace a female literary tradition and challenge those elements of the literary tradition and the feminine gender role that constrain her. In other words, the position of woman in relation to art is one that is ambivalent. This ambivalence, which characterizes women writers’ attempts to create canonical or high literary texts, also critically informs theoretical attempts to situate not only women’s literary efforts but also to situate the representation of women in literary efforts by both male and female writers.

What we think of as “feminist theory” or “feminist literary criticism” emerges out of this deep ambivalence between a desire to celebrate women’s literary production and a desire to critique the ways in which gender inflects not only that literary production but also literary representations of women. The first explicitly feminist literary criticism and theory thus centers on two parallel projects, both of which are present in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: recovering or rediscovering female authors, in an attempt to trace a women’s literary history, and examining the representation of women in literature, most often in an attempt to examine how these representations reflect the subordinate position of women in patriarchal culture. A paradigmatic example of the former enterprise is Elaine Showalter’s book A Literature of Their Own; a paradigmatic example of the latter is Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics. Thus, in early feminist criticism, the question becomes whether we’re discussing women and literature – how women can enter into the production of literature and how they have done so historically – or women in literature – how literature represents women and the impact that such representation has on the way that women are regarded in culture.

Ultimately, these early critics tend to embrace a liberal-feminist approach to the critique of literature and culture. As radical feminist perspectives gain traction moving toward the late-1970s, however, the questions that feminists address move out of the ivory tower and into the realm of popular representations of women. As this happens, divides emerge within the feminist community about how to “do” feminism” and about what it means to call oneself a feminist, and these divides come to inform what we recognize as feminist theory and criticism today. Early feminist criticism and theory tend to be rooted in white, upper-middle-class, privileged liberal humanist ideologies and to be focused solely on gender, excluding how gender intersects with other identity categories. As feminist discourses develop throughout the 1970s, those early dominant discourses are questioned on the basis of race, class, and sexuality. Women-of-color feminists challenge the notion that race and gender can be considered separate from one another; Marxist feminist challenge the notion that class and gender can be considered separate from one another; feminists from a variety of sub-categories challenge the notion that gender can be considered separately from sex and sexuality.

It is this last challenge – the challenge to feminist approaches that elide the centrality of sex and sexuality to women’s experiences – that I think proves most crucially significant to what feminist theory and criticism becomes in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. This is not to dismiss the significance of race- and class-based critiques of feminist discourses. Rather, by examining the tensions that emerge as feminists attempt to grapple with the sexual objectification of women – instead of simply the objectification based on gender – we see that feminist discourse and criticism comes to be rooted in women’s bodies and not only in their socialization according to prescribed gender norms. This marks a crucial shift in feminist theoretical approaches, and it influences not only gender-focused feminist critiques but also critiques that integrate a discussion of gender and class or race. By insisting on the crucial ways in which women’s experiences and perspectives are embodied, feminists make the leap from a liberal feminist approach to literary criticism to a poststructuralist theoretical approach to literary criticism.

In the late 1970s, feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine A. MacKinnon offer a targeted attack on pornographic representations of women. Dworkin and MacKinnon, among others, see such representations as violent assaults on women – not only the women who act in pornographic films or who pose for pornographic pictures but also everyday women. For anti-pornography feminists, pornography reduces women’s bodies to objects for male consumption and use; this objectification then has real-world consequences, for in a culture that endorses such representations, they argue, all women become objects for male fantasies of violence and rape against women. Women, as sexual objects, lack agency, and the path to women’s empowerment rests in eradicating such sexual objectification. The most radical extension of such arguments is that any sexual relationship between women and men is rooted in patriarchal structures of oppression, and to identify women as their sexuality constitutes the most deeply rooted form of sexual oppression.

But not all feminists agree. Indeed, the strong reaction against this monolithic feminist approach forms the foundation not only for poststructuralist theory but also for postfeminist theory, which it is important to note is not identical to poststructuralism. While the critique of gender stands as foundational to a feminist theoretical and critical project, to define women solely through gender, as anti-pornography feminist and liberal feminist approaches both tend to do, only serves to further reinforce the way that our culture tends to equate “woman” with a woman’s ability to embody a “feminine” gender role. Thus, the project of poststructuralist feminist theorists becomes to decenter the feminine-gendered subject: to provide a theory for female creativity and representation that depends upon bodies and pleasures and that draws a distinction between the experiences of real women in patriarchal culture and the representation of women in texts. Such a project challenges many foundational assumptions of feminist theory and criticism: it challenges the idea that such theory and criticism constitutes viable political action; it challenges the idea that literature mimetically reflects the material conditions of women in the real world; it challenges the idea that subjectivity can be reduced to an effect of one particular facet of identity politics.

When such critiques are most successful, they tend to embark on a project that attempts to disrupt the mind/body split that feminist theory inherits from Cartesian philosophy. For example, in theories of l’ecriture feminine, feminist theorists emphasize the way that “writing the body” empowers female subjects, allowing for jouissance (a Lacanian term that indicates enjoyment with an orgasmic connotation, and which critics like Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva associate with a female-centered aesthetics) in the literary text. Similarly, feminist theories rooted in performance studies, such as those of Judith Butler, attempt to disrupt that split between the mind and body in their discussion of how gender and sexuality are performatively constituted by individual subjects, or to put it more simply, the way that individuals create their gender and sexual identities in language and in action. Such theories themselves inspire controversy, for within such theories, some argue, there is little room for political agency and action. Critics of such theories, who see women’s political agency and action rooted in the definition and promotion of a clearly articulated and articulatable identity for women as women, contend that to root feminist theory in fragmented and contingent ideas about subjectivity compromises the ability for women to organize for political gain and to achieve empowerment. Critics also challenge more recent feminist theoretical perspectives because of their own dependency on masculinist theories of subjectivity or for exemplifying the theories that they articulate with examples from writing by male, rather than female, authors. (For example, one of the most frequent challenges to l’ecriture feminine is that feminist theorists often cite its occurrence in texts by male authors, as Hélène Cixous does when she discusses James Joyce’s fiction.)

In addition, what we might term “postfeminism” also emerges in opposition to earlier versions of feminist theory and criticism, but I would argue such approaches are problematic at best and damaging at worst outside of a poststructuralist theoretical context. “Postfeminist” approaches are most often identified with a kind of “sex-positive” feminism, and they emerge out of an ideology that the battles of second-wave feminism have been fought and won, and so now women are “free” to do what they want. They’ve come a long way, baby, as any issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, with its tips for better orgasms and more exciting sex will tell you. Such approaches tend to be reductive, and they tend to reinforce gender stereotypes about women, albeit with a twist. Postfeminism offers a kind of "Sex and the City" version of what it is to be a woman in our culture, assigning the independent woman a “sassy” attitude and an obsession with shoes. Often, such approaches fail to interrogate woman’s position in culture in sophisticated ways, and in this failure they reaffirm woman’s subordinate position in culture.

So as we move to consider feminist theory and criticism in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, it becomes clear that what we mean by “feminist theory and criticism” has in no way been settled. The terms of feminist theory and criticism continue to be contested, and they continue to be informed by developments in other branches of theory and criticism. Feminist theory and criticism, nevertheless, still exert powerful influence over the way that we view literature and culture in the twenty-first century. As I said at the beginning of this post, feminist theories endorse particular strategies for approaching texts and cultural phenomena; they constitute a way of reading rather than a definitive answer to what the Victorians called “the woman question.”

Some possible questions that you might consider as you conceive your blog posts for next week might include the following:
• How have you tended to define feminism in your own life, and how does thinking about feminist theoretical perspectives and approaches affect your personal definition?
• Does it make sense to approach texts and culture with this kind of political agenda? Why/why not? Is doing so limiting or does it open up new possibilities? Some combination of the two?
• Who can “do” feminist theory? Who can be a feminist? Why do you think so?
• How does feminist theory interrogate and extend other theoretical perspectives you’ve examined this semester?
• Is Mantissa a “feminist” text? How would different feminist theoretical approaches influence a reading of the novel?

I’ll be reading your responses with interest, and I look forward to seeing what you have to say!

Guest Lecture, Ashley Shelden on Lacan

I'd like to welcome this week's guest lecturer, Ashley Shelden, a Ph.D candidate at Tufts University who specializes in 20th century British literature, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Her post on Lacan lucidly and thoroughly addresses some of the complexities we have discussed in class--including the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the mirror stage. The post will be enormously helpful as we discuss Lacan and psychoanalytic theory in relation to Mantissa. For this week's post, due by Friday at noon, please respond to the guest lecture. The questions posed at the end of the lecture should help you get started. Thank you, Ashley, for extending, deepening, and enriching our discussion on Lacan and psychonanalytic theory.

Jacques Lacan’s “return to Freud” stands out not merely as a repetition of the tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis, but also crucially as a reworking of them. Indeed, one of Lacan’s most important and innovative contributions to the field of psychoanalysis remains his attempt to think psychoanalysis, a theory of sexuality and the subject, through the framework offered by structuralist linguistics. Though Lacan’s writings and ideas are infamously complex and multilayered and though they insist upon the impossibility of ever fully and finally deciphering their “meaning,” one might nonetheless say that if there were a “key” to Lacanian psychoanalysis, this “key” would be precisely Lacan’s rewriting of the Saussurean “sign.”

Saussure writes the sign like this:

                       S (signified)

---

                      s(signifier)

Lacan rewrites the sign as such:

                       s (signifier)

---

                      s(signifier)

Whereas in Saussure’s theory the signified (the meaning of the word) is the privileged term, in Lacan’s theory the signifier (the word itself) becomes the privileged term. Moreover, for Lacan, the “signified” turns out to be just another signifier. Language, Lacan suggests, can produce the illusion of meaning only by one signifier’s reference to another signifier. Meaning is produced, then, not through the magical operation by which we might imagine one word (signifier) is wed to only one meaning (signified), but rather through a rhetorical figure called metonymy. Metonymy can be defined as a relation of proximity, as a word-to-word connection. Meaning gets produced through a sliding movement from one signifier to another: word-to-word-to-word-to-word. But the effect of this sliding or slippage is not meaning or truth, but rather the illusion of meaning, because there is nothing in this movement that forces it to stop finally at a fixed meaning. Metonymy as slippage produces meaning as an effect, not as a verifiable fact. We can pursue meaning—both linguistic and existential—with as much passion and energy as we want, and indeed we do, but the continuous metonymic movement of language insists that this pursuit will be infinite. The end of our pursuit of meaning is no end at all; we will only find another signifier that will lead us to another and to another and to another. Lacan thus exposes the way in which the meaning that the signified might seem to provide proves to be radically unfixed.

All of Lacan’s theory rests on this fundamental observation that there is no signified, only signifiers, only words. Everything else—his theories of the subject, of desire, of the constitution of reality—issues from this premise and the logical corollary it implies: insofar as there is no signified, no identifiable or fixed meaning for any one signifier, that which constitutes who we think we are, what we think we want, and what we think of the world shows itself to be radically unhinged. The linguistic structure of Lacan’s psychoanalysis has such deep and broad ramifications, because he suggests that linguistics applies not only to language but to humans as well. Why? Lacan’s great observation about the human subject is precisely that we, each and every one of us, are constructed through and as language. That which imbues us with an apparent sense of identity, with desire, with “meaning” is precisely language itself. There is no human subject, for Lacan, before language. Language makes us who we are, and we are nothing other than signifiers in a metonymic chain, slipping and sliding towards a sense of self. But not unlike the signified, no matter how far we travel down the path to “personal meaning,” in pursuit of our identities, what we find is just another set of signifiers that will continue to propel us through our infinite pursuit. In order to grasp more concretely the concept of a human subject that emerges through and as language, think, for instance, of The Matrix. For Lacan, we are like the figures in the matrix, made up of pure code. But instead of being made up of numbers, the subject for Lacan is made up of language, of signifiers. Lacan’s term for this matrix-like structure is “the Symbolic.” There is NO OUTSIDE of the Symbolic in Lacan’s theory. We cannot enter and exit the Symbolic as we choose. Rather, we are born in the Symbolic; we live in the Symbolic; and we die in the Symbolic. None of us exists outside language. Without language, you are not you; I am not I. Indeed, the matrix of language, the Symbolic, makes us who we are. Without it, we are nothing.

If Lacan’s rewriting of the Saussurean sign is the “key” to his theory, then desire is the keynote of psychoanalysis. Desire is an absolutely central concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, every subject is imbued with desire. Not one of us is exempt from it. The reason for this, as you may have anticipated, is language. The fact that the human subject exists only within the Symbolic has everything to do with the centrality of desire in our lives. To understand the relation between language and desire, you could imagine the Symbolic, or language, as a system from which there is something lacking. It is as though language is a puzzle that was created with one missing piece. To be within language is to be continually circling around this absence, attempting to find something to fill this void. But the void, this lack, is constitutive of the system of the Symbolic itself. It cannot be filled. The activity of attempting to fill the void in language is, for Lacan, synonymous with desire. Desire also responds to this lack. Since we are all subjects constructed through and as language, the void that constitutes language also constitutes us. Just as there is a hole at the center of language, there is a hole at the center of the subject, a void that we attempt to fill through desire. But the void in the subject is constitutive; it cannot be filled. Thus, insofar as language is structured as metonymy, desire follows the same structure. For Lacan, DESIRE and LANGUAGE are synonymous. If you are talking about language, you are also talking about the activity of desire. And if you are talking about desire, you are always already talking about the linguistic structure of metonymy, which is the structure of language as such. Metonymy designates not just the proximate relation of one word to another but also movement from word-to-word-to-word, and therefore the suggestion that desire takes the structure of metonymy makes good sense. After all, when we desire, we pursue an object that we think will fill the lack within us; in this pursuit, we move ever closer to achieving the object of desire. Lacan refers to the object of desire as the objet petit a. And just as the metonymic model of language designates that we can never finally access meaning, so too the metonymic model of desire suggests that we can never access the object of our desire, the objet petit a. In desire, one always only approaches the object of desire but never quite reaches it. Or, if you do finally get the object of your desire, the boy or girl or iPhone of your dreams, you will inevitably find that the thing or person you thought you wanted turns out to be not as good as you thought. Thus, you begin pursuing another different object, maintaining the metonymic movement of desiring. Desire does not end, because it can never be satisfied, propelling one infinitely towards a goal just on the horizon, “whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move,” as Tennyson wrote in “Ulysses.” The inability to be satisfied by the object of desire maintains the lack in the subject, a void that can never be filled.

The void that structures the Symbolic thus suggests that the human subject is profoundly unstable. No one has a fixed, coherent identity. All one can ever have is the illusion of identity. The idea of identity as illusory brings us to the question of the “Mirror Stage,” which imbues the infant with just such an illusion. The word “illusion” suggests the realm of the visual, and in so doing, points to the importance of the visual image in Lacan’s theory of the subject. Images, or illusions, coincide with our experience in the Symbolic, and Lacan refers to the register in which these images appear as “the Imaginary.” Thus, the Symbolic and the Imaginary intertwine to make up our visual-linguistic sense of the world. It would seem that though the Symbolic is profoundly unstable, what produces stability is precisely the Imaginary, which would follow the old dictum, “seeing is believing.” But the Imaginary does not confer actual stability on the world or the subject. If anything, the Imaginary can only produce the illusion of stability through the operation of the image. The instability of the Imaginary becomes most clear in Lacan’s essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” which you read for class. On the one hand, the mirror stage is the moment in which the infant apprehends its sense of identity through the perception of an image in a mirror. The infant experiences the solidification of its identity, realizing that before seeing its image it was a “body in bits-and-pieces,” a body fractured and fragmented without any coherence. The image in the mirror provides the coherence that was missing before and in so doing produces the idea of identity. On the other hand, the identity achieved in the mirror stage turns out to be just the idea of identity, the promise of identity, and not identity as such. Moreover, the mirror stage does not eliminate anxiety caused by instability but actually creates new anxiety.

First of all, the mirror stage does not provide the infant with an identity, or with coherence, but rather invites the infant to anticipate a future in which it will have an identity. But this future is illusory—indeed, imaginary—to the extent that all subjects, whether infants or not, are only ever aspiring to being whole and coherent. The lack in the symbolic, the lack that constitutes the subject, insists that this be the case. We will never be whole; we will never have a concrete sense of identity. One can only ever anticipate having an identity. This is what Lacan means when he writes that the mirror stage “situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming.” Identity is first and foremost “fictional.” And moreover, the subject is always only “becoming” an identity; one cannot say that the subject “became” an identity, because the process of “becoming” is un-ending. One only ever “asymptotically” approaches having an identity, moving towards but never quite reaching it. Secondly, I said that the mirror stage doesn’t alleviate but creates anxiety. Once the infant sees its image in the mirror, feeling jubilant anticipation about the identity it will become, it also simultaneously becomes aware of the fact that before the encounter with the mirror image, it was a “body in bits-and-pieces.” The “body in bits-and-pieces” is utterly disorganized, incoherent, unstable, and without any sense of identity, anticipatory or otherwise. With the recognition that the infant once was this fragmented being, even as it jubilantly anticipates becoming the ideal image of itself in the mirror, it also begins to feel anxiety and fear. What the infant becomes anxious about is becoming again that “body in bits-and-pieces.” The logic of the anxious infant runs: if I was once that fractured being, without any sense of self, I could easily become that again. Thus, even as the joyful promise of identity exists for the infant in the mirror stage, coinciding with this promise of coherence is the danger of incoherence. The infant realizes, in other words, that the illusion of identity is just that: an illusion. There is nothing in the Symbolic or the Imaginary—in the registers of language or the image—to ensure stability and guarantee meaning. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, we have no solid ground on which to stand.

What finally creates this instability in Lacanian psychoanalysis is something like Derrida’s concept of différance. It is a force that undoes meaning, destabilizes our sense of self, and shatters reality. But instead of différance, Lacan calls this force “the death drive.” The death drive occupies each of us; it is within each of us from the start. However, the death drive is not what it sounds like it is. You might think that “the death drive” is a suicidal impulse, which drives us to kill ourselves. But it is not that. Rather, the death drive is that which leads us to destroy our Symbolic and Imaginary goals. That is, if in the Symbolic we desire and pursue meaning, something to fill up the lack in the self and in language; and if in the Imaginary we anticipate and pursue a concrete, coherent image of identity, then the death drive wants us to abandon the search for meaning and for identity. The death drive aims not to fill in but to preserve the void in the self. According to Lacan, the death drive finds its most intense manifestation in the sexual act, and in particular, in the moment of orgasm. In French, a colloquial term for orgasm is “le petit mort,” which means “little death.” It is precisely the “little death” of orgasm for which the death drive strives. When you have an orgasm, you lose any sense of yourself; you forget the world for the sake of sexual release. You are no longer thinking about what you need to do, who you think you are, or even where you are. Lacan calls this orgasmic moment of blindness jouissance. “Jouissance” means “enjoyment” in French, and it derives from the verb “jouir,” which also means “to come.” The death drive thus directs human subjects away from Symbolic and Imaginary coherence and towards the single goal of sexual satisfaction. And since the experience of jouissance shatters, if only momentarily, our sense of self, the death drive is contrary to every attempt to confer identity upon the subject and meaning upon the world. The death drive is that which always threatens to undo one’s sense of self in favor of sexual gratification.

Sexual satisfaction and identity are thus completely contradictory. The death drive aims for sexual satisfaction, for jouissance, and jouissance is precisely what shatters identity. Thus, Lacanian psychoanalysis provides us with not only a theory of the subject constructed through and as language, not only a theory of the way identity is shaped through images, but also a theory of why the term “sexual identity” is illogical. For Lacan, “the sexual” is antithetical to identity. And the structure of identity is endangered by “the sexual.” What this suggests is that sexual identity politics are going to be profoundly troubled from the outset insofar as the category of “identity” has nothing to do with “sexuality.” These two concepts are so radically separate that one cancels out the other. Where identity prevails, the sexual, the death drive, and jouissance become obscured. And where sexuality erupts, identity categories fall apart. It turns out to be the case, in other words, that the factor—sexuality—which contemporary culture associates most closely with one’s “true” self, has nothing at all to do with one’s self at all. Sexuality, for Lacan, radically destabilizes the self and threatens to undo all the structures within which we try to make meaning of the world.

With all this in mind, here are some questions that you might consider for your blog posts:

• How does Lacan’s theory of the linguistic constitution of the subject inform the world Fowles creates in Mantissa?
• When you consider the force of the death drive, and jouissance as the orgasmic shattering of the self for which the death drive aims, how might you read the first section of Mantissa?
  
• Do you find Fowles representing the tension Lacan theorizes between sexuality and identity? Or is Fowles refuting Lacan’s theory? If he is refuting it, does Fowles provide an alternative model to Lacan’s theory?
• What can Lacanian psychoanalysis help us to see not just about literature but also about the “real world” within which we live?
  

I’m looking forward to reading your responses to these and any other issues that arise on your blogs!

Happy Election Day, Everyone

Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

I know what I need to take apart my baby’s heart

As we start Mantissa this week, I'd like you to think about how the novel addresses various concepts and theories: the death of the author, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, Marxist criticism, or postmodernism.

For this week's post, give a close reading of a passage in the novel, explaining its connection to one or more of the concepts and theories we've discussed. Let this post be practice for the close readings you'll be doing in your papers.

Guest Lecture, Ken Rufo on Baudrillard

I am happy to introduce our guest, Ken Rufo, and to include below his engaging, thorough, and thought-provoking lecture on Baudrillard. We will be discussing the lecture in class, so print out the post and bring it to Thursday's class. For your post this week, due by the Friday at noon, prepare a response to Ken's post by offering your thoughts on Baudrillard's work. I think you will find much to think about regarding the functions and limits of critical theory. Thank you, Ken, for a fantastic post.

I want to thank Dr. M. for giving me a chance a) to watch as your semester progresses and see as you wrap your heads around a lot of very interesting readings, and b) to contribute a bit on one of the folks whose work had a big influence on me and my thinking. And I very much want to preemptively thank you for reading this post and for (hopefully) responding to it with any comments, questions, or suggestions you might have. And so, without further preamble:

Jean Baudrillard - French sociologist, philosopher, pataphysician - I don't really know what you should call him. People say he was a postmodernist, whatever that means, but he repeatedly disavowed the label and said that he was actually arguing against postmodernism. The interpretations of his work are all over the map. Some theorists, like Arthur and Marillouise Kroker laud Baudrillard's alleged celebration of postmodern culture, John Armitage refers to his work as a "tired" form of postmodernism, Mike Gane thinks Baudrillard failed to be radical enough, and heavyweight Doug Kellner complains that Baudrillard lost it when he gave up on trying to help advance and improve Marxist thought, which was his only really valuable contribution. Everyone seems to have a different read, which is probably a sign that Baudrillard is a deceptively difficult thinker. Or that people are crazy.

In what follows, I'll try to give something like an historical overview to Baudrillard's work, as well as attempt to situate him relative to some of the other theories you have encountered.

Baudrillard begins as a Marxist, and if you go take a look at his early works, you'll find a heavy Marxist bent and an explicit engagement with Marxist thinkers (most notably Lukacs and Debord). His first book of original theorizing, System of Objects, is an attempt to modify structural Marxism (which focuses on the material modes of production, and which begins its critical analysis of the commodity by talking about things like use-value - what an object does - and exchange-value - how much it is worth relative to something else). Baudrillard felt that structural Marxism was too limited, and that it needed to incorporate "sign-value" into its analysis. By sign-value, Baudrillard is pointing to something that seems obvious to us today, namely that often what an object represents or signifies is more important than how much it costs or how high quality is its construction. If you want a really obvious example, think about Tommy Hilfiger, who doesn't even make his own clothing, but instead buys cheap, sweatshop made clothing and adds his brand to it - that's sign value, pure and simple. Baudrillard argues (this is back in the 60s and early 70s) that focusing on sign-value means that you have to focus on patterns of consumption rather than the modes of production.

Sometime later, in a book called For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard sets out to explain how the commodity can be understood as a sign in and of itself, and vice versa, how the sign is understood as a form of commodity logic. This book is brilliant but almost mind-numbingly complicated, and suffice it to say that at the end of a whirlwind tour of theorizing about semiotics and commodity-forms, Baudrillard argues that even the Marxist idea of the commodity is always already a function of a preexisting sign-value, or to put it another way, that Marxist theory requires, implicitly, a prior set of assumptions about how language works and how they influence thought. So this book is the first of several shifts from the early Baudrillard: instead of trying to add sign-value to the commodity, like he did previously, now Baudrillard is saying that actually sign-value is what made possible the analysis of the commodity in the first place.

Now how is that possible? Again, it's a rather complicated story, but part of what Baudrillard is getting at is that we cannot assume that the commodity, as analyzed by Marx, is really a "discovery." It could be that Marx is inventing the commodity even as he "discovers" it at work, since by analytically codifying the commodity and explaining how it works to support capitalism, he is establishing a set of theoretical principles that make of the commodity-object a set of theoretical commodities. In other words, instead of buying stuff with my money, with Marxism I can explain stuff with my theories and concepts. Those two movements are not unrelated.

At the risk of trying a bit of specificity, think about this: in semiotics (from Saussure) the sign is comprised of the signifier (the phonemes that comprise a word) and the signified (the concept of the word), and the signs only gain meaning through a sort of negation, or what Saussure calls their diacritical function, which is really just a fancy way of saying we know what something is because of what we know it isn't. Like a cat isn't a dog, or truth isn't falsehood, that sort of thing. Saussure also says that this meaning is facilitated by the fact that language functions as a system, governed by grammar and syntax and what not, and that makes things a lot easier than if people were just shouting out words in random order. For Marx, the commodity is structured very much like the sign, except instead of signifier and signified, it has use-value and exchange-value, and it gets transformed from merely a random object of value into a "commodity" through its exchange with other commodities, a process that eventually gives rise to a pure form of the commodity - money. Marx says that money is the pure commodity form because money can be exchanged for anything; in other words, it is pure exchange value, and of course this hides all the labor that went into making it, labor that was probably done in order to make the object have a use-value, and that was probably exploited so that the capitalists could turn it into surplus-value. Put into specifics: people ( i.e. laborers) worked to make a chair comfy and sturdy, but when it gets converted into whatever dollar amount for which it will be sold, we lose sight of that whole labor component and even of use-value, thinking instead primarily (maybe even only) of its exchange-value.

Anyway, I'm explaining all of this in order to suggest that the structure of the two systems - Saussure's semiotics and Marx's critique of Capital - are rather similar. Not the same, but close enough, and after another 150 pages of examining this relationship, well, Baudrillard's arguments about what this closeness means are pretty convincing.

So where does this lead him, or us? Well, interestingly, one of his conclusions is that these systems of analysis, with all their critical power, are still just new systems of exchange-values. Remember when I wrote previously that Marx's analysis of the commodity becomes a kind of theoretical commodity, something that we use to make our class papers or arguments look good? For Baudrillard, the possibility exists that these new systems of exchange, in this case "critical theory" or "Marxist theory," become a model of sorts that produces its analyses as if they are self-fulfilling prophecies. One just follows the analytical formula, deploying the right terms or concepts when needed, and voila, you've got yourself some good criticism. This starts to frustrate him after a while. Think about it for a bit, we'll come back to it.

Anyway, by the time he is done with Political Economy of the Sign he has decided that Marx has a lot more problems than just forgetting about or not predicting the importance of sign-value. Instead, he argues that Marx goofs up, badly, in that he "naturalizes" labor, i.e. he makes it seem like in the absence of capitalism (either before industrial capitalism, or after the communists take over), man will simply labor because he likes to labor, and he likes to labor because he likes being useful, or likes producing things with use-value. In this way Marx justifies focusing on who controls the modes of production, arguing that it should be the workers (come on, unite!) who control production and not the capitalists with the surplus money. Viva la revolucion and stuff. Baudrillard thinks the problem here is that once you naturalize labor, the only thing you can focus on is production, and for Baudrillard production is a wrong turn. Capitalism doesn't care who produces what, he argues, instead all it cares about is that it is constantly producing stuff, because in the end capitalism is about consumption, not production, and the only way to continue to justify consumption is to constantly have new objects produced in order to consume them. So Marx got it backwards: capitalism isn't about the production of exchange-value, it's about the naturalization of use-value ( e.g., "Oooh, I could sure use that new gadget!"). Each of these are actually sign-values, that is, theoretical sign-values. So Baudrillard argues that really Marx's theories are the "mirror of production" and are a good rhetorical balancing act that actually helped support capitalism rather than subvert or oppose it. If you want confirmation of this theory, from someone who is not a particularly big Baudrillard fan, check out Susan Buck-Morss's Dreamworld and Catastrophe, where she basically shows that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. spent the Cold War talking about who could make more stuff, more efficiently, and both routinely supported government-funded campaigns celebrating factory work, with one saying, basically, "let's show those godless commies!", and the other saying "let's show those evil capitalists!"

But wait a second, you're thinking, I thought Baudrillard was the guy who said everything is a simulation. What's all this random Marxist stuff? Don't worry, we're getting there. See, in System of Objects, simulation is already one of Baudrillard's concerns, but he doesn't really use the terminology in the same way. What he does say is that the mass production of objects and the general flow of wealth is making it possible, more and more, for people of lower classes to "simulate" living like people in the upper classes. I, too, can have representations of fine art on my wall, or something that looks like a good desk. It won't be a family heirloom made by Master Deskmakerman, but it won't be a beat up bit of plywood laid across some half-broken bricks, either. In the years after System of Objects, Baudrillard sticks with his interest in simulation (though again, he doesn't really focus on it in those terms), and does so following two basic themes: first, the new media of television (mostly television), though all media do it in some ways, seems to increasingly speed up, copy, and generally make artificial things appear real, and second, all these theoretical models, like Marxism, are functionally critical simulations, constantly making artificial meanings appear as if they are the real meanings, and pretending to discover insight when in reality they created the model that produced the insight, so they produced more of a simulation of insight rather than anything novel.

So around 1976, in another huge book, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard first sets forth this idea of simulation as being of particular value, devoting a whole chapter to what he calls the "order" of simulation. At the time, he identifies three basic orders. In the first, simulation stands in for reality, this is the order of the counterfeit or of forgery. In the second, simulation hides the absence of reality. And in the third, simulation produces its own reality, as if reality was the consequence of a model that makes possible its production.

The example I always use to explain this is that of money, which is, after all, a good example, since it also happens to be Marx's pure commodity form. So think about it this way, once upon a time, if you had a cow, and I had some hay, and you wanted hay and I wanted some beef, we might meet up, decide how much hay the cow is worth and make a trade. But of course, we're not going to carry the cow or the hay around in our pockets or on our backs, so we'll need some kind of icon that signifies the cow or hay, and that we trust signifies it correctly. So if I have a carving of the cow, you need to trust that the carving doesn't exaggerate how much meat is on the cow, or if I have some drawings of the hay, you need to trust that I actually have some hay at all, or that the hay corresponds to the amount of hay depicted, and so on. Now chances are that we're going to trust each other enough to make our deal, since after all, if we finally go to make the exchange and realize we've been cheated, we would call off the exchange. This use of icons, then, is the first order of simulation. But it gets to the point where I get annoyed carving a new cow each time I go to market, and there are moments when I just don't need hay, just like there are moments when you just aren't hungry for beef (I'm a vegetarian, so that moment has been like 12 years for me, but whatever), so we come up with something else: money. I assign a dollar amount to my hay, and you assign one to your cow, and now we don't need to exchange goods, instead we exchange money, which now stands in for the perceived or assumed exchange value of the goods or services we wish to purchase. Hell, I don't even need to own hay. I just need some cash, and I can get the beef, because after all, you can then use that cash to go buy yourself some hay. Or some alcohol. Or some Elvis albums. It doesn't matter, because the use of money no longer requires any actual referent to a real object or action. In other words, it's the second order of simulation. But this creates some uncertainty, because it turns out that my $20 one day may not buy the same amount as my $20 dollars on some other day, which means, egads, that the value of my $20 varies. In effect my $20 isn't actually $20 dollars, or at least isn't any objective value that can be called $20. Confusing. Think about the stock market if you want to see this principle carried out to its extreme: a company can appear to be doing well because it exceeded expectations, even though the expectations were very low and it's still not making a profit, and yet the value of the stock, and thus the company, rises independently of the value of what they produce or how well their goods are being received. The dot com bust and Enron show that the stock market works in ways that are often unrelated to anything remotely objective or verifiable, and yet entire fortunes and values are predicated on the flow of stocks and the expectations of the stock holders. In effect, the value is determined by a model of that value, rather than some real reference outside of that model. Even when the bubble bursts and certain companies collapse within that model, as with the dot commers and Enron, the really odd part is none of those collapse changes anything - the stock market keeps on ticking as if those failures are the exception rather than the norm, and the money made by Ken Lay and others is still their money. There are moments when it actually does collapse or crash, at least in part, and we can think of these as a bit of reality's revenge, but overall the model stage of simulation is so pronounced that it just keeps on trucking.

I'll get back to the media and technology side of this equation in a second, but real quick let me say that this is exactly the case with Marxism: it is just another model, and as such a simulation, and since it is about producing a truth, in ends up inadvertently feeding the idea of production that it attempts to subvert or oppose as being the evil axis of capitalism. It is also the same problem that Baudrillard has with psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan. Psychoanalysis acts like it has discovered the unconscious, but really what it does is to produce the unconscious as an expository device in accordance with its own precepts. Lacan had an army of terms and tricks, and each of these purport to explain something real out there in the world or in the psyche, whereas Baudrillard argues that it invents them. Baudrillard also sees the same model process overtaking Foucault, in that by the time Foucault writes his famous History of Sexuality, vol 1 power basically means everything, everywhere, for everybody, and so the truth of analyzing power is precisely its invention as a theoretical model. The point is that everyone keeps producing these systems of production, proliferating signs and truths and concepts, and yet doing so with the pretense of discovering what they are actually inventing. These forms of critical thought are false start for Baudrillard, and in the end, he argues that side with the subject's desire to produce meaning for itself, even if the meaning it produces is the codified uncertainty of its meaning. Ambiguity is perfectly palatable to the subject, he argues; ambivalence, on the other hand, can be revolutionary.

It is at this point that hopefully some of the earlier discussion seems useful. The binary relationship between a signifier and signified in semiotics replicates the formal logic of the commodity: by positing a relationship of equivalence (exchange) between signifier and signified (even diverse, polyvalent signifieds), the logic of signification controls and dominates the production of meaning: meaning may be misunderstood or distorted, but fear not, for in the end, meaning is possible. Signification establishes a positive code of meaning, another victory of form occluded by the debate over semantic content. In turn, the commodity rhetorically circumscribes the sign: meaning can be consumed, used, exchanged. And so we return to a fairly banal metaphysical trap, desperately searching for the meaning of the something so that we can deny its alternative — nothingness, confusion, whatever. Baudrillard puts it this way in Symbolic Exchange and Death: "Expression always falls into the trap... of assuming the force of an authority, an agency, rather than a substance. Western thought cannot bear, and has at bottom never been able to bear, a void of signification, a non-place and a non-value. It requires a topography and an economics" (p. 234).

Against signification's positive value, Baudrillard (p. 161) positions the "symbolic," an affect of meaning that falls outside the process of signification, the "outside the sign" of which "we can say nothing, really, except that it is ambivalent." Symbolic exchange, this formal ambivalence, would contrast with the productivist logic of exchange found in signification. Sounds a bit vague, eh? It is, necessarily; any clarification of the symbolic succumbs to the logic of signification. Small wonder that Baudrillard has a difficult time explaining the concept and can offer only a limited array of illustrations (most notably the ritual of gift-giving in premodern societies). As a consequence, Baudrillard abandons explicit hope in symbolic exchange as a counter to signification shortly after its initial introduction, despite strong initial support: "Only symbolic disorder can bring about an interruption in the code" (p. 4). He talks about the "Code" a lot in the 70s, as it's his short hand for the idea of a theoretical model that determines or produces reality as an effect, in the same way that computer code produces a program or application.

Anyway, that's the 70s. He writes a fairly famous book called Seduction, where he argues that we should try to seduce rather than produce, play with appearances rather than deconstruct them. The book gets a lot of crap for being rather sexist, which it is or it isn't depending upon your point of view. For the most part, the book's interesting because it's his next attempt to think of an alternative to all the problems of critical thought he's laid out. I mean it's tough to announce that pretty much most forms of critical thought invent the stuff they purport to discover, that they support the things they fight against, and then still offer a coherent and useful alternative to all of that. So a lot of Baudrillard's work from '76 on is an attempt to try to tease out different possibilities. I won't go through them all, but at various points in times he suggests: symbolic exchange (gift economies), seduction, pataphysics, fatal theory, radical theory, impossible exchange, nihilism, yada yada. They're all thought experiments, so it's not really fair to harsh on their inadequacies too much.

Ok, cue the exciting music. Fast forward a bit and imagine it's the early 80s now, and Baudrillard writes the book that would eventually be featured in the first Matrix movie: Simulacra and Simulation. Here he picks up the discussion of simulation in Symbolic Exchange and Death and runs with it, stressing two things: first, that the third, model stage is really a simulacral stage rather than a simulation stage, and second, that the orders of simulation are really a kind of ontological precession of reality, in that each one causes a regression that overwhelms the relationship between reality and its others in the previous stages. A simulacrum is a term that is first covered by Plato and it basically means a copy without an original, a somewhat paradoxical definition, but one that makes sense if you've ever visited Epcot or the ET ride down at Universal Studios, where you get to wander around the forest that you see in the movie as you wait in line to ride in the fake bicycle. These look like simulations, but they're actually so fake that they aren't actually copying anything, they're just making stuff up and telling you it's like the real thing. "Oh look, we're in the Japanese section of Epcot now! You can tell, because that lady is wearing a kimono and that store sells soba noodles. Woo hoo!" By the time this third stage shows up, the culture of simulation is so massive, so entrenched, that there's really no hope of uncovering the real on our own. In fact, the problem with simulacra is that they effectively "realize" things, which is to say, make them real. It's like going to a national park and trying to figure out where the really famous pictures were taken, so you can recreate the picture - the simulational stuff is so pervasive that you filter your real experiences through the simulation of that reality. This is what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal. And the reason there's no way out of it is because even if you go off to wherever you're going to see if the simulation you saw of it previously was really accurate, you're already relating to the real through the referential lens of the simulation. So the real you discover will always be an effect of the simulation, a copy or non-copy of it. It's like the real is the moon or a satellite that now orbits the earth, rather than the other way around.

Eventually, Baudrillard adds a fourth stage to the simulation hierarchy, what he first calls the viral or fractal stage of simulacra, and eventually decided to call "integral reality," a state where simulation is everywhere, and no longer even needs models, because it is so pervasive that it means nothing and everything all at once. If we want to keep with our money example, the fourth stage is the stage of credit and virtual banking. You can infinitely defer paying something, buy it on credit, make small payments. The money gets debited automatically, you spend it by swiping a card, you never even see the money, barely remember how much you spend, and even when you spend it, you're not really spending it, since you are really borrowing it against the idea that you'll eventually pay it. I read recently that consumer debt - the amount consumers have advanced to themselves under the name of "credit" - is at a staggering 210 trillion dollars, from which I think it's safe to say that this virtual flow of money is what is keeping the American economy afloat, not actual productivity. Again proof that, as Baudrillard realized pretty early on, it's consumption that makes capitalism work, not production.

Baudrillard has also written about how this question of simulation affects politics, first in his much maligned The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, which dealt with the first Guld War, and then in his much condemned The Spirit of Terrorism, which dealt with 9-11. I actually think both books are quite insightful, and they're short, so grab copies, you'll like them, or at least like hating them.

He has also recently played with the idea of impossible exchange, in a book of the same name. The idea is that the world ultimately resists our attempts to theorize it, whether those attempts are philosophy or physics, and that this actually may be a saving grace, in that it hints that there's a point where even integral reality may fail to integrate the entirety of its opposition. In this, it also means there are limits to the simulacral nature of exchange-value and signification: "Everything which sets out to exchange itself for something runs up, in the end, against the Impossible Exchange Barrier. The most concerted, most subtle attempts to make the world meaningful in value terms, to endow it with meaning, come to grief on this insuperable obstacle" ( Impossible Exchange, p. 6).

At the end of the day, Baudrillard is not trying to rescue the real, if such a thing is even possible, but he is trying to rescue illusion, and for him there can be no illusion in a world where everything is "realized." Despite being made popular through The Matrix movies, Baudrillard actually disliked the films, precisely because he thought the incredible special effects actually reproduced the problem of simulation into it. Baudrillard wants instead for there to be the possibility of illusion, of non-meaning, of mystery, and much of his work attempts to reproduce that. As he says in a number of places, his work is like science fiction theory, but that's the only kind of theory that doesn't fall into the trap he identifies in critical thought.

A few bits of trivia before we go.

First, in the fourth version of the Matrix script - they shot the fifth version of the script, which was just the fourth with some edits - Baudrillard is actually mentioned by name. Some of the dialog in the first movie - like "welcome to the desert of the real" and "there is no spoon" - are actually direct quotes from various Baudrillard books. In addition, Keanu Reeves, who takes a lot of crap somewhat undeservedly,* was actually required to read Simulacra and Simulation, and two other books, before auditioning, and the audition included a discussion of the book.

Second, there's a great apocryphal story of Baudrillard giving a talk in Las Vegas, mixing together bits of poetry, his own writing, and karaoke, all while wearing a gold lamet suit.

Third, Baudrillard was also a professional photographer, and has several books of photographs and had several professional exhibits.

Fourth, the animosity of some towards thinkers like Baudrillard and Derrida is almost shocking, and for those of us who feel enriched by their work, whether we agree with it or not, reading some of the pieces published when Baudrillard and Derrida died is rather depressing (both died very recently, as did one of my all time favorite thinkers - Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe). This post is long enough, but as one of the first comments, I'll post an embarrassingly spiteful review of Baudrillard's work published in, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Education, so you can get an idea for the sort of vitriol I'm talking about.

That's it for the post, but I'm certainly willing to hang out and answer questions to the best of my ability. Baudrillard was my first great theorist love, and I remain very fond of him, though there are others in whom I invest more time and energy. Still, Baudrillard has always seemed to me to be full of interesting things, and even his misses (and there are many misses) still pack a wallop. I hope this helps, and if you have any questions, feel free to offer them in comments

*I say "undeservedly" because hey: he surfs, he likes science fiction, he actually really got into the Baudrillard reading, and he's a huge fan of the brilliant British group XTC. All things considered, he can't be that bad.

Want to read some Baudrillard? Selected writings are available on our Web-CT.

This week's post on authorship is two-fold. First, you will discuss a specific point in Barthes's "The Death of the Author" or Foucault's "What is an Author?". Second, you will venture out into blogworld, find a post on an academic/theory blog that discusses authorship (the author function in literature, blog authorship, pseudonymity, etc.) in some way, link to the post in your post, and offer commentary on the linked-to post. You may handle this in one long post or in two separate posts.

To create a hyperlink in your post, highlight the word or phrase you are using to refer to the post (for example, Bitch Ph.D. on Academic Blogging) and then click on the green icon, which is third on the left top of the compose box. A pop-up box will appear. Put the URL for the link in the box. This will create a link like this.

Ideally, you will find connections between what you are reading in Barthes and Foucault and what you find about authorship on the blogs. How are blogs treating the ideas that authorship is performative and that the author is a fiction/function?